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Healthcare
Clinical AI, diagnostic bias, patient safety and medical-device regulation — the healthcare front of AI ethics, daily.
Continuous assurance for AI-driven clinical decision support systems
Healthcare systems are rapidly embedding adaptive and generative AI into core clinical processes. The integration of Artificial Intelligence into Clinical Decision Support Systems (AI-CDSS) highlights a fundamental transformation within healthcare delivery. This transformation enables advanced predictive analytics, multimodal data integration, and real-time augmentation of clinical decisions. However, AI introduces systemic, ethical, operational, and governance risks that challenge traditional h
A comparative evaluation of quantum machine learning architectures for breast cancer classification using clinical and genomic data
IntroductionIn recent years, high-dimensional clinical and genomic data have gained significant importance for prognosis and personalized medicine in breast cancer. But the use of quantum machine learning (QML) on such data is limited by the availability of few qubits, the computation time of quantum simulation, and dimensionality reduction. This work systematically compares several QML architectures for breast cancer classification in the presence of realistic and simulator constraints.MethodsT
“But it sounded confident”: the role of accuracy, tone, and disclaimers in users' medical decision-making
IntroductionArtificial intelligence (AI)-powered chatbots are increasingly used in healthcare for applications ranging from symptom triage to lifestyle guidance. Their effectiveness depends not only on their ability to provide reliable information but also on users engaging with their advice while remaining aware of potential inaccuracies. This study investigated how users perceive AI-generated medical advice, with a particular focus on the roles of accuracy, conversational tone, and disclaimers
Overview of RAG-based and LLM-based approaches to personalization in healthcare AI applications
Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs), driven by transformer architectures such as Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (GPT), are opening new frontiers in healthcare Artificial Intelligence (AI) by enabling clinically relevant interactions between patients and clinicians. Yet persistent challenges—including limited real-time knowledge access, safety concerns and insufficient patient-centered contextualization—indicate that current systems often fall short in delivering efficient and rel
Rethinking Clinical Relevance in Chest X-ray Machine Learning: How Evaluation References Define Performance
Chest X-ray (CXR) machine learning relies heavily on automated evaluation using reference standards that aim to approximate clinical judgment. However, commonly used report-derived labels for pathology classification or generic image quality metrics for reconstruction may not reliably reflect clinical judgment. We systematically investigate how evaluation-reference choices affect model performance and ranking in both pathology classification and image quality assessment (IQA). To enable controll
Aligning LLM-Simulated and Human Examinees for Psychometric Calibration: A Cognitive Diagnostic Profiling Approach
Psychometric calibration for educational tests typically requires costly human response data. Large language models (LLMs) simulated examinees offer a promising route to early calibration, but their responses are too accurate and too uniform. We propose Cognitive Diagnostic Profiling (CDP), a zero-shot framework that prompts LLMs to simulate plausible examinees with diverse cognitive profiles: binary attribute-mastery patterns are rendered as natural-language profiles and sampled under an uninfo
Clark Minor out as Health and Human Services’ IT chief
HHS has removed Minor as the agency’s CIO online. The ex-Palantir executive began at the agency in February 2025. The post Clark Minor out as Health and Human Services’ IT chief appeared first on FedScoop .
Development of a Blockchain-Based Platform to Enable Indigenous Data Sovereignty and Shared Research Participation With Indigenous Communities: Technology Prototyping and Community Engagement Study
Background: Historic and ongoing problematic practices regarding the collection, storage, and use of Indigenous health data have led to the need to ensure principles of Indigenous Data Sovereignty (IDS) are followed in research practices and technology development. Objective: This project, a partnership between UC San Diego and the Native BioData Consortium (NativeBio), sought to explore the practical application of blockchain technology and its potential to facilitate Indigenous-led research co
Effectiveness and Implementation of Digital Health Interventions on Physiological, Psychological, and Functional Outcomes in Adults With Multimorbidity: Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials
Background: Multimorbidity involves heterogeneous disease combinations, treatment burden, competing priorities, and complex care pathways. Digital health interventions (DHIs) may support monitoring, self-management, and care coordination, but their effects on health-related outcomes remain uncertain. Objective: This systematic review and meta-analysis evaluated the effectiveness of DHIs on physiological, psychological, and functional outcomes in adults with multimorbidity, summarized implementat
The Performance of ChatGPT-4o and DeepSeek-R1 in Interpreting Thyroid Nodule Ultrasound Text Reports: Multicenter Study
Background: Although thyroid nodules are detected in up to 60% of adults on ultrasound, the vast majority are benign, creating a substantial decision-making burden compounded by heterogeneous practice guidelines. Large language models (LLMs) show promise in processing unstructured medical text and are emerging as tools for report interpretation among both clinicians and patients. However, their reliability across distinct clinical tasks in thyroid ultrasound interpretation remains poorly charact
A Large Language Model–Driven System for Advance Care Planning Training Among Health Care Providers in the Chinese Context: Development and Technical Evaluation
Background: With the expanding need for advance care planning (ACP), innovative educational strategies for training health care providers are increasingly required. Large language model (LLM)–based ACP chatbots offer a novel and potentially effective solution to enhance health care providers’ competence in navigating complex ACP conversations. Objective: This study aimed to develop a Chinese-context ACP corpus to support an LLM-based chatbot and evaluate the feasibility and performance of a mult
Shadow AI in Swedish Health Care: Qualitative Analysis of Physicians’ Free-Text Answers
Background: The rapid emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) has outpaced its formal adoption in health care organizations, contributing to the emergence of Shadow AI, defined here as the use of unauthorized AI tools by medical professionals. Under the European Union Medical Device Regulation, AI tools used for clinical purposes must undergo conformity assessment before use; general-purpose tools such as ChatGPT have not done so, rendering their clinical application unauthorized at the regula
Therapists’ Professional Roles in Guided Internet-Delivered Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in Specialized Mental Health Care: Interview and Observational Study With Health Care Professionals
Background: Therapist-guided internet-delivered cognitive behavioral therapy (guided iCBT) is increasingly implemented in routine mental health care to expand access to evidence-based treatments. Although the clinical effectiveness and patient acceptability of guided iCBT for common mental health disorders are well established, less is known about how introducing such digitally mediated interventions reshapes therapists’ everyday work practices and professional roles. Existing research has prima
Generator-Aligned Representation Interfaces for Diagnostic Soft Equivariance
Exact-equivariant architectures typically encode prescribed group actions in specialized operators, which can complicate their reuse with generic backbones and across data modalities. We introduce the Generator-Aligned Representation Interface (GARI), a representation-level design principle that exposes selected transformation generators to a generic sequence backbone through aligned canonical and generator-induced views. We formalize the resulting behavior using a probe-specific soft-equivarian
Knowledge-Guided Multimodal Reasoning over Interacting Streams for Video-Level Ambivalence and Hesitancy Recognition
Ambivalence and hesitancy (A/H) are conflicting affective states that precede the delay or abandonment of health behaviour change. Recognition of A/H at the video level is difficult, since the signal arises from disagreement across and within facial, vocal, linguistic, and bodily modalities, and manifests differently across individuals. The proposed PRISM-AH (Predictive Reasoning over Interacting Streams for Multimodal Ambivalence/Hesitancy Recognition), is a framework that treats A/H as a multi
Knowledge-Guided Multimodal Reasoning over Interacting Streams for Video-Level Ambivalence and Hesitancy Recognition
Ambivalence and hesitancy (A/H) are conflicting affective states that precede the delay or abandonment of health behaviour change. Recognition of A/H at the video level is difficult, since the signal arises from disagreement across and within facial, vocal, linguistic, and bodily modalities, and manifests differently across individuals. The proposed PRISM-AH (Predictive Reasoning over Interacting Streams for Multimodal Ambivalence/Hesitancy Recognition), is a framework that treats A/H as a multi
A Cost-Effective Multimodal LLM Reasoning Framework for Question Answering over Irregular Clinical Time Series
Question answering (QA) over irregular clinical time series (ICTS) plays a pivotal role in a wide range of healthcare applications. Although recent multimodal time-series large language models (LLMs) have shown considerable promise in general-purpose time-series QA, they remain poorly equipped to model the sparsity, asynchrony, and irregular sampling patterns of clinical observations. To fill this gap, we propose ClinPRISM, a cost-effective multimodal LLM reasoning framework for question answeri
AI is transforming health care, but not everyone will share the benefits
AI is transforming Canadian health care, using datasets that underrepresent Black, Indigenous and racialized Canadians.
Evaluating Multi-Turn Multimodal Diagnostic Reasoning on Challenging Real-World Clinical Cases
Clinical diagnostic evaluation should not only assess whether models can provide correct diagnoses, but also reflect the realities of clinical practice, including progressive disclosure of multimodal information, dynamic updating of diagnostic hypotheses, and continuous refinement of clinical reasoning. However, existing evaluations of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) typically rely on single-turn or isolated tasks, making it difficult to fully capture the complexity of real-world clinic
NHS England reprimanded over Palantir data access omission
Staff from controversial tech company have been given ‘unlimited access’ to identifiable patient data
China’s AI-Enabled Consumer Health Ecosystems
AIA chief Eric Fanning on the budget and the health of America’s defense industry
Fanning also gave The Break Out his take on the state of foreign military sales and the room for reform.
HHS continues health tech initiative with 7 new industry pledges
The Trump administration says 60% of Americans now have access to medical records through an app of their choice because of its health technology initiative.
From Deterministic to Generative Deep Learning for Urban Air Quality Reconstruction from Sparse Observations
Full-field reconstruction of air pollution is essential for evaluating pollution exposure and supporting public health decision-making. However, the complex interactions among pollutants, hard-to-predict weather patterns, and limited monitoring station coverage make this a complex task. We apply deep learning techniques to provide fast and accurate reconstructions from sparse observations of four key pollutants: NO2, O3, PM2.5 and PM10. Models are trained on full-field simulation data and evalua
Cognivia: A Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Copilot for Evidence-Based Mental Healthcare
Cognitive distortion amplifies negative emotions and contributes to mental health disorders. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is an effective way to address cognitive distortions, but its large-scale application is limited by the shortage of professional therapists. Although large language models (LLMs) have recently been explored for mental health applications, existing methods still suffer from limited domain specificity, overly flattering responses, and the absence of well-defined annotatio
DynaBridge: Dynamic Summary-Guided Cross-Task Multimodal Fusion for DASS-Structured Mental Health Assessment
Multimodal behavioral analysis offers a scalable approach to assessing depression, anxiety, and stress, yet generic fusion models often ignore the psychometric structure of questionnaire labels. In DASS-21, risk labels are derived from ordered symptom items through fixed item-to-subscale mappings. We propose \textbf{DynaBridge}, a dynamic summary-guided cross-task multimodal framework for DASS-structured mental health assessment. DynaBridge encodes acoustic, visual, and textual cues across multi
OmniPhys: Knowledge-Graph-Driven Benchmarking and Collective Optimization for Physical Commonsense in Text-to-Image Generation
While text-to-image models exhibit remarkable visual fidelity, they frequently violate fundamental physical commonsense. Existing benchmarks often rely on coarse-grained descriptions, failing to diagnose the mastery of specific physical principles. Moreover, the high stochasticity of generative processes causes current prompt optimization methods to suffer from gradient hallucinations, where optimizers are misled by transient visual artifacts rather than systemic flaws. To address these challeng
Defining Health Misinformation: Theoretical Concept Analysis
Background: Health misinformation is a serious and growing concern, especially in the era of mass digitalization. However, the term lacks conceptual clarity, reducing our ability to build a reliable, replicable evidence base about how misinformation works and undermining our attempts to develop effective responses. There is, therefore, a need to examine how the term is used and to develop a coherent definition that better reflects people’s information priorities, concerns, and understandings of
Beyond Epistemia: Epistemic Schizologia and Large Language Models as Techno-Semiotic Machines
Quattrociocchi and colleagues warn that the fluent outputs of large language models may allow linguistic plausibility to substitute for epistemic evaluation, producing the condition they call *Epistemia*: the experience of possessing knowledge without undertaking the practices through which judgment would ordinarily be warranted. This article accepts that diagnosis but challenges its explanatory framework, which compares an embodied, socially situated human knower with an isolated generative mod
Disaster Response: Lessons Learned in Supporting Mothers and Young Children
What GAO Found The unique needs of mothers and young children during disasters include appropriate sheltering, feeding and care supplies, medical and mental health support, and other services, according to relevant literature and disaster service providers from selected local, state, and nonprofit organizations. For example, large shelters may not be the best option for families with infants. Mothers also often need diapers, baby food, and infant formula. Service providers from 12 local, state,
PatientAgentBench: A Benchmark Framework for Evaluating Patient-Facing Health AI Agents
Health AI is evolving from answering questions to agentic systems that converse with patients, reason about health records, and act on their behalf. Primary care guards against diagnostic errors and unsafe care; agents assisting in this domain warrant evaluation against the same risks. Current benchmarks focus on medical knowledge, assessed through isolated question-answering or clinician-facing tasks. PatientAgentBench benchmarks patient-facing agentic healthcare; it evaluates a foundation mode
SafeStats: Efficient 2PC Protocols for Data Statistic-Related Functions
Statistical analysis on sensitive datasets like medical records and financial transactions is essential for decision-making, but raises significant privacy concerns. While existing secure Two-Party Computation (2PC) makes extensive efforts in designing the common secure primitives (e.g., addition and multiplication) or machine learning-related functions, few pay attention to the statistical functions. In this paper, we propose SafeStats, a secure toolkit tailored for 2PC secure statistical analy
From Cellular Responses to Pharmacological Domains: Multimodal Zero-Shot Drug Representation Learning
Multimodal drug discovery enables drug representation learning beyond chemical structure by incorporating cellular responses such as gene expression and cell morphology. However, direct fusion and instance-level contrastive alignment may mix mechanism-related signals with modality-specific noise and incorrectly separate structurally dissimilar but biologically related compounds. This limitation can obscure transferable mechanism patterns required for predicting the properties of unseen compounds
Socioeconomic Inference in LLM Medical Triage: Same Symptoms, Different ZIP Code
arXiv:2607.22605v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate whether large language models alter medical triage recommendations for identical symptoms when only the patient's socioeconomic status (SES) varies. Using three deployment-tier models (Gemini 3.5 Flash, Claude Sonnet 4.6, GPT-5.4-mini), we hold a single neurological symptom profile fixed and vary the SES signal along two channels: explicit (insurance status, occupation, housing) and implicit (a US ZIP code, with no other socioeconomi
Auditing Institutional Heterogeneity for Generative AI in Patient Education: A Large-Scale Study of 102 US Transplant Handbooks
arXiv:2607.22606v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Health systems are rapidly deploying generative AI assistants that answer patient questions from institution-authored education materials, on the premise that grounding in local content yields consistent guidance. Whether it does depends on a question not previously measured at scale: do the underlying documents themselves agree? We use a structured-output large language model judge to audit 5,730,465 pairwise comparisons across 102 patient-educati
The Clinical Trial Pipeline Reveals the Next Wave of Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare: A Multidimensional Analysis of 8,532 Registered Studies
arXiv:2607.22607v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The prospective clinical evaluation of artificial intelligence in medicine has expanded rapidly, but the global AI clinical trial landscape remains incompletely characterized. We systematically identified AI-related trials registered in ClinicalTrials.gov using a broad keyword search followed by an LLM-based classifier. Each trial was classified across seven dimensions: clinical function, data modality, specialty, AI integration and autonomy, workf
A Computational Ethical Framework for Financial Digital Phenotyping for Mental Health
arXiv:2607.24275v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Ethical governance of AI-driven systems is often expressed through high-level principles and static documentation, creating a gap between regulatory requirements and system-level verification. This challenge is particularly acute in digital phenotyping, where continuous behavioural data raises concerns around consent, privacy, and fairness. In this paper, we propose a computational ethical framework for AI-driven digital phenotyping system in whi
AI Systems in Text-Based Online Counselling: Ethical Considerations Across Three Implementation Approaches
arXiv:2601.08878v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Text-based online counselling scales across geographical and stigma barriers, yet faces practitioner shortages, lacks non-verbal cues and suffers inconsistent quality assurance. Whilst artificial intelligence offers promising solutions, its use in mental health counselling raises distinct ethical challenges. This paper analyses three AI implementation approaches - autonomous counsellor bots, AI training simulators and counsellor-facing augmenta
Principles and Guidelines for Randomized Controlled Trials in AI Evaluation
arXiv:2605.02050v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This work establishes a framework for standardizing AI evaluation RCTs (sometimes called human uplift studies). Drawing on established practices from disciplines with established RCT traditions, including software engineering, economics, clinical and health sciences, and psychology, we synthesize five principles drawn from established validity frameworks and open-science standards on transparency, repeatability, and verification, which together
Fairness Interventions in Classification: A Study on AI Explainability
arXiv:2407.14766v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper presents a philosophical and experimental study of fairness interventions in AI classification, centered on the explainability and transparency of corrective methods, and on the opposition between two fairness criteria, namely Demographic Parity and Equalized Odds. Our main argument is that even as a gap in Demographic Parity is used to diagnose inequality between groups, Equalized Odds constitutes a more reliable fairness crit